CHIRP Radio Best of 2013: Kyle Whelliston | Blog

Kyle Whelliston writesCHIRP Radio Best of 2013: Kyle Whelliston

CHIRP Radio Best of 2013

Throughout December, CHIRP Radio presents its members’ top albums of 2013. Our next list is from volunteer Kyle Whelliston.

Justin Timberlake – The 20/20 Experience, Part 1 (RCA)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

Guy walks into a bar. “What is this?” the bartender asks. “Some kind of joke?” Well, what’s so funny about a former Mouseketeer and five-time weekend sketch comedy show host who can show up every once in a while, whenever he deigns to, and effortlessly drop a pop album from five years in the future? (And, in this particular case, also entice millions to purchase a disc of B-sides?) The first edition of The 20/20 Experience has eight-minute prog pop epics that move from chapter to chapter, but retain lyrical or thematic connective tissue throughout. Nights out on the town usually start in one place and end in another, so it’s about time music caught up. Its inclusion here will likely screw up CHIRP’s ranking algorithm in 2013, but the Timberlake track record indicates that this album will only be properly understood by 2020. Hence the title.
CHVRCHES – The Bones Of What You Believe (Glassnote)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

Two Scotsmen walk into a bar. “Andy won!” one exclaims. “Our boy’s finally done it! Round of Tennent’s on me!” The other stops and pauses. “There’s only one problem, Ethan. We’re still stuck in Scotland.” From Donovan to The Poets to Teenage Fanclub and beyond, nobody in the world can do melodic melancholy like the Scots. One has to keep a chin up when the weather is more random and miserable than ours. Plus, it helps if you have a pretty voice like Lauren Mayberry does.The Bones Of What You Believe is all broken families, failing relationships, yearning, non-fulfillment, hurting, deep triangular ache. But it’s catchy and hummable, and you can dance to it! (Not too wildly, though. Best to be proper.)
Weekend – Jinx (Slumberland)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

Four shoegazers walk into a punk joint on the rough edge of town. “Shoegazers, huh,” the bartender sneers. “Shouldn’t you be playing with some effects pedals, or writing pretty poetry about your feelings?” A chaotic brawl ensues, the newcomers litter the floor with leather-clad rockers, and then they command the shellshocked bartender to make them negronis with coiled orange peels. Weekend’s second album was a dark, menacing oil slick of barely contained hatred, but all that immensely expansive doom was wrapped inside a deceptively fuzzy ball. It was like a hot hair dryer to the face during your angsty and conflicted coma summer of 2013 (especially in Julyyyyyyyyyy).
Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time (Columbia)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

Two indie musicians walk into a holding cell. “What you in for?” one of the other prisoners asks, trying to strike up a friendly conversation to pass the time. “Drugs!” they reply. “Lots of them, too!” For the young hazel-eyed ingenue’s first full-length record, seemingly forever in major-label turnaround, It was difficult to extricate the late-autumn tabloid fodder from the music. Especially when it came out and it sounded like that. Night Time, My Time has explosive pop melodies, depth-charge hooks and middle-school playground shoutalongs… but the dirty, smeared mumblecore production is the unmistakable sound of certain substances. It’s exhilarating to listen to! Like drugs.
Neko Case – The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You (ANTI-)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

A mother and daughter walk onto an airport shuttle in Hawaii. The little girl is singing a happy song and smiling at the other passengers. The mother screams, “Get the fuck away from me!” It’s a moment that was only captured because one of America’s (and Chicago’s) greatest songwriters happened to be on the bus as well. She was recovering from the recent deaths of both parents, and turned it into the most emotionally brutal 2:38 pressed to wax in calendar annum 2013. The album with 17 words in its title contains a lot of contemplations about the fragile connections that bind people together, related and not so, as well as those that bind people to their motivations (or, “that fire”). It’s unlikely to be the most played Neko Case album in anybody’s iTunes, but it’ll continue to be there whenever you need it.
David Bowie – The Next Day (Columbia)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

An aging hipster walks into a record store. “Why so glum, chum?” the counter clerk asks, ironically. “I invested my entire life savings in Bowie Bonds,” the customer explains. ”I can’t afford to buy vinyl records anymore.” The clerk pulls an 8.5 x 11 white sticker from under the counter and plasters it on the customer’s face. “Cheer up, dude! It’s the next day!” Somewhere, a graphic design grad student is writing a 300-page thesis on Jonathan Barnbrook’s mind-blowing album cover, the subversion/inversion of rockist nostalgia, and how David Bowie has remained rock’s foremost futurist for four decades. It must be difficult to constantly reinvent oneself while maintaining a Self, so ”And I tell myself/I don't know who I am” might be the second most affecting refrain of the year.
The Low Frequency in Stereo – Pop Obskura (Long Branch)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

Emperor Tomato Ketchup and a copper-colored Slinky walk into a giant green fingerprint. “I’m still so bummed that Stereolab is gone,” says one to the other in an unintelligible alien language. “What are we going to do now?” Just then, a red-colored man with slanted eyes and Elvis hair happens by. “Here!” he says, spraying them with an unencoded MP3. “Try this!” TLFIS, a Norwegian quintet, made four albums of ambient music for special people, took four years off, then came back with a new twist on Minimoogy lounge pop: quirky Sugarcubes lyrics, shoegazey soundscapes, and spiky electroclash elements! And an insistently repeated earworm like “subie, subie” verges on vengeful, especially when the men pick it up on the back nine. Now it’s in your head too, just like it’s been in mine for the past month.
The Foreign Exchange – Love In Flying Colors (FE+ Music)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

A producer and an emcee walk into an Okayplayer chat room. “Man, I keep forgetting that we don’t have to do this anymore,” says the latter. “We live across the state from each other.” Phonte and Nicolay, the North Carolina underground legend and the Dutch master of warm plush soundbeds, made their first hip-hop album together nine years ago by trading files back and forth over the internet. Things worked out pretty well for both of them. They’ve evolved into a duo that deals in Grown-Folks R&B, that rare genre that fulfills the everyday soundtracking needs of monogamous urban thirtysomethings, the ones who don’t need their pop music to be about all that steppin’ in the club raise ya glass up all night to get lucky Peter Pan ish. Grown. Folks. R&B. Unh!
Bare Mutants – The Affliction (In The Red)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

Three men and two women walk into the Empty Bottle. They’re all dressed completely in white, some wearing masks. “”What the hell is this?” the online rock critic suddenly yells out from the back of the bar, near the Pray For CHGO sign. He throws his Old Style can at the stage. “This is terrible! You’re derivative! Boooooo!” Just as suddenly, his face is frozen off by a big icy blast of Farfisa organ, and he dies. We’ll miss you, online rock critic. We’re a city full of supergroups, and Jered Gummere and Jeanine O’Toole have earned the right to do whatever he wants, and there will always be room on our playlists for bleary Jesus & Mary Chain-inspired fuzz rock about not giving a fuzz. We all suck at life, after all.
The Proper Ornaments – Waiting for the Summer (Lo)
BUY: Reckless / Permanent / Insound / iTunes / eMusic

A guy walks into a used women’s clothing store in London. He’s distracting the cashier so his girlfriend can steal a pair of boots. “‘Allo,” he says. The cashier is also a musician, and they exchange numbers and start a band. Unlike the other nine lead sentences on this list, this is actually a true story. It’s technically a side project — that was Veronica Falls’ male singer behind the counter. James Hoare and Argentinian shoplifter’s accomplice Max Clapps sing Everly harmonies over Australian jangle-pop with big British Invasion melodies, which makes it the best part of every Wes Anderson movie all rolled into one, but better than that. Note to friends and fellow CHIRPies: this is the band I’ve been drunkenly raving about for the past six months. In bars, where else.